Digital technology dramatically impacts the creation, distribution, sale, marketing, and consumption of copyrighted digital content. Due to the popularity of the Internet and mobile devices, producers of digital content are under pressure and have a desire to profit from these new developments and reduce their vulnerability to the risk. The risks are more obvious to producers of digital content than the potential benefits of the new technologies.
In the pre-digital age, copyright protection systems consisted of legal mechanisms to prosecute individuals and groups that ran large-scale illegal reproduction facilities for profit. Intellectual property pirates in the pre-digital age were subject to traditional law enforcement techniques because they required physical assets to reproduce the physical media of the books, music, or video. In addition, the complications imposed by distribution of the reproduced copies made the intellectual property pirates even more vulnerable to detection. From the consumer's perspective, an illegal copy was not as attractive as a legal copy because the illegal copy was typically lower quality and not promptly available.
The digital age provide the intellectual property pirates with the ability to make flawless copies that are infinitely reproducible and may be transmitted instantly anywhere in the world. This marked a shift from a paradigm where a large number of individuals made a few copies to one where relatively few individuals can make many copies. The introduction of cassette tapes in the early 1980s was the first notable example of pirating in the digital age. The record companies combated the piracy by printing on the record jackets the slogan “Home Taping Is Killing Music”. Eventually this lead to cassette tape manufacturers paying mandatory licensing fees to the holder of the intellectual property rights to the work.
Producers of digital content are rightfully concerned with this new capacity to cheat them of a fair return on their intellectual property and have been reluctant to take advantage of digital commerce opportunities. Yet digital commerce offers the potential to increase earnings while cutting the high overhead costs of production, distribution, warehousing their goods while presenting new business opportunities. It is believed that if producers of digital content were sufficiently confident in their ability to protect their assets in digital form, they would gladly take part in such a system.
Legal and regulatory means exist to protect digital content however, a deterrent is necessary to make the illegal copying and distribution of copyrighted digital content difficult and traceable. For this reason, the deployment of a solution for the management of digital rights is a necessary precursor to digital production, dissemination and consumption of copyrighted digital content. The solution does not have to be technically unbreakable, but merely leverage the laziness of a typical user by making it hard for the typical user to bypass restrictions or rules.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) involves the description, layering, analysis, valuation, trading, and monitoring of an owner's property rights to an asset. DRM covers the management of the digital rights to the physical manifestation of a work (e.g., a textbook) or the digital manifestation of a work (e.g., a Web page). DRM also covers the management of an asset whether the asset has a tangible or an intangible value. Current DRM technologies include languages that describe the terms and conditions required by an owner when a buyer purchases an asset, systems that track asset usage by enforcing controlled environments or encoded asset manifestations, and closed architectures for the overall management of the intellectual property rights held by the owner.
The Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) is a DRM architecture standard for protecting digital content in an open or trusted computing environment. ODRL defines a standard vocabulary for expressing the terms and conditions over an asset. ODRL covers a core set of semantics for these purposes including the identification of the property rights to the work and the expression of permissible uses for manifestations of a protected asset. Rights can be specified for a specific asset manifestation or format or could be applied to a range of manifestations of the asset. ODRL does not enforce or mandate any policy for DRM, but provides the mechanisms to express such a policy. ODRL does not presume that mechanisms exist to achieve a secure architecture, but complements existing rights management standards by providing digital equivalents and supports an expandable range of new services that can be afforded by the digital nature of the assets in the Web environment. In the physical environment, ODRL can enable machine-based processing for DRM. The web site “http://odrl.net” includes more information about ODRL, as well as, ODRL electronic resources such as the ODRL Specification (version 1.1), the ODRL Data Dictionary (version 1.1), and the ODRL Expression Language (version 1.1).
The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is a standard for exchanging data and metadata electronically. Metadata is data that describes data. For example, the term “author” is metadata that describes the data “William Shakespeare”. XML is an outgrowth of the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) that allows the author of an XML document to separate the logical content of the document from the presentation of the content. An author of an XML document adds metadata to a document as hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) tags in the document. A document type definitions (DTD) file is the mechanism that adds shared content to the XML document. The web site “http://www.w3.org/” includes more information about XML.
The eXtensible rights Markup Language (XrML) is an XML conforming language definition that specifies rights, fees, and conditions for using digital content. XrML also describes message integrity and entity authentication rules. XrML supports commerce in digital content such as publishing and selling electronic books, digital movies, digital music, interactive games, and computer software. In addition, XrML supports the specification of access and use controls for secure digital documents in cases where financial exchange is not part of the terms of use. The web site “http://www.xrml.org/” includes more information about XrML.
Superdistribution involves transmitting, or communicating in some manner, digital content from one user device to another user device. Superdistribution of digital content is problematic because it is an efficient means for distributing the digital content, but management of the digital rights associated with the digital content is difficult. The Napster web site allows authenticated users to freely distribute MP3 audio files and is an excellent example of the benefit and the bane of superdistribution. When an authenticated user accesses the Napster web site, Napster adds the address of the authenticated user's local computer to a list of every authenticated user. Any authenticated user can access any other authenticated user's local computer to retrieve stored MP3 audio files. The commercial digital content providers who produce the songs that comprise an album were not pleased with Napster because they were not able to recoup payment for each transfer of their songs. Thus, Napster's efficient superdistribution scheme usurped the digital rights owned by the commercial digital content providers.
The Bluetooth specification describes the operation of a Bluetooth device and short-range radio network communication protocols necessary to create an ad hoc network of up to eight devices operating together. Each Bluetooth device operates in the 2.4 GHz radio band reserved for general use by Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) applications. Each Bluetooth device periodically attempts to find any other Bluetooth device within their ten-meter radio communications range. When two Bluetooth devices are in the ten-meter range, each device determines the services offered by the other device using a service discovery protocol (SDP). The SDP searching function relies on links being established between the requesting Bluetooth device in a client role and the responding Bluetooth device in a server role to find out about services in the responding Bluetooth device and how to connect to them. The web site “http://www.bluetooth.com/” includes more information about Bluetooth, as well as, Bluetooth electronic resources such as the Bluetooth Specification (version 1.1) and the Bluetooth Profiles (version 1.1).
An inquiring Bluetooth device initiates a connection with another Bluetooth device by sending an inquiry message to every other Bluetooth device in the vicinity of the inquiring Bluetooth device. When another Bluetooth device in the vicinity performs an inquiry scan, the other Bluetooth device recognizes the inquiry message and responds appropriately. The inquiry response is a message packet containing the Bluetooth Device Address (BD_ADDR) for the responding device. The Bluetooth Device Address is a unique, 48-bit IEEE address that is unique for each Bluetooth device.
The inquiring device uses the information provided in the inquiry response packet, to prepare and send a paging message to the responding device. The inquiring device enters a page state to establish a connection and transmits initial paging messages to the responding device using the access code and timing information acquired from the inquiry response packet. The responding device must be in a page-scan state to allow a connection to the inquiring device. Once in the page-scan state, the responding device acknowledges the initial paging messages and the inquiring device sends a paging packet that provides the clock timing and access code of the inquiring device to the responding device. The responding device responds with a page-acknowledgment packet. This enables the two devices to form a connection and both devices transition into a connection state. The inquiring device that has initiated the connection assumes the role of a master device and the responding device assumes the role of a slave device in a new ad hoc network piconet.
Each piconet includes one master device and up to seven slave devices. All communication is directed between the master device and each respective slave device. The master initiates an exchange of data and the slave responds to the master. When two slave devices communicate with each other, they must do so through the master device. The master device maintains the network clock for the piconet and controls when each slave device can communicate with the master device. Members of the ad hoc network piconet join and leave as they move into and out of the range of the master device. A piconet can support distributed activities, such as collaborative work projects, collaborative games, multi-user gateways to the Internet, and the like. A user's device that joins a particular piconet does so to enable its user to participate in the currently running collaborative activity.
A Bluetooth enabled laptop computer can send information to a Bluetooth enabled printer in the next room. A Bluetooth enabled microwave oven can send a message to a Bluetooth enabled mobile phone announcing that the meal is ready. Bluetooth will become the standard in mobile phones, PCs, laptops and other electronic devices, enabling users to share information, synchronize data, access the Internet, integrate with LANs or actuate electromechanical devices, such as unlocking a car. A passenger can use a laptop or handheld computer to compose an electronic mail message while flying in an airplane and, after landing, Bluetooth devices that are ubiquitously located around the airport terminal can automatically forward the messages to the Internet. In another example, while waiting in an airport lounge, the passenger can receive interesting duty-free offers directly on the laptop or handheld computer or play multi-player games with friends.
There is a need to protect the property rights of commercial providers of controlled digital content. For the commercial providers to generate revenue from the controlled digital content that they own it must be sufficiently difficult to use the controlled digital content outside of their control. There is also a need to allow non-controlled digital content to become a mass-market phenomenon and evolve as a grassroots movement without any control by the providers of controlled digital content. Thus, there is a need for a digital rights management system, method, and computer program product for restricting access to digital content data based on a classification of the digital content data as either controlled digital content or non-controlled digital content.